It all started with a shopping trip to Halifax two weeks ago. Winter had finally moved on. The sun was out. The temperature was rising and Julia Roberts-Davison and her 13-year-old daughter, Makayla, made the mother-daughter trek from Truro to a Bluenotes outlet store to buy some new summer clothes for school.

Ms. Roberts-Davison, in her 30s now, wore jeans and t-shirts and shorts back in her junior high hey-day. But in this modern day, in 2014, where hemlines seem to creep ever higher in women’s fashion, she is keenly aware that girls shorts can be, well, really, really, really short.

“I wanted to get Makayla some shorts that she would be allowed to wear to school,” Ms. Roberts-Davison says. “And I thought we were following modest directions. I mean, I had her bend over in the shorts. I had her do the whole thing — and nothing hung out.

“Nothing was exposed. Nothing. We are always very careful of what we buy for her. I have two daughters and the last thing in the world I would want is for them to be exposed in any way.”

What mom and daughter settled on where two pairs of jean shorts, plain old jean shorts, that cost about $30 total and appeared to be about as tame as jean shorts were 20 years ago, and 20 years before that. Makayla, a good student, with a solid group of friends at Truro Junior High, headed off to school Friday morning in her new shorts, on a bright and sunny day. A day, her mom alleges, where female students wearing shorts that were above the knee were summoned to vice principal Shelley MacLean’s office for closer inspection.

“Makayla has never been down to the office before, not for anything,” Ms. Roberts-Davison says.

“She called me on her morning break Friday to tell me she had got in trouble for her shorts. I thought it must have been a misunderstanding. So I phoned the school and then I went to the school and asked to meet with the vice principal. I just wanted an explanation. I just wanted her to show me where it said that it was not okay for Makayla to wear these shorts. But there was nothing anywhere that said that. And the best part of all was that [vice principal MacLean] said Makayla’s shorts were a “distraction to the male population of the school.”

“A woman said that to me, and as we are sitting at her desk, she is wearing a low-cut, V-neck top. So I said to her, ‘Your chest is exposed, is that OK?’ She didn’t really know what to say to that.”

The vice principal isn’t saying anything now, referring all questions to the Chignecto-Central regional school board — who told me that it would be a violation of “privacy” to discuss the specifics of the case.

“As a school board, we have a code of conduct,” board spokesperson Debbie Buott-Matheson said. “In that code of conduct it instructs school members to dress appropriate — as per the school’s instructions. Each school is responsible for determining what is and isn’t appropriate dress for their school members, and that means all staff and students.”

The instructions posted on Truro Junior High’s website tell students to dress appropriately, defined as: “Clothing should be appropriate for an educational setting. A dress code that will not cause distraction to fellow students and staff will be consistently enforced. [For example] not wearing jackets in class, revealing clothing, studded-jewelry, chains.”

Makayla, meanwhile, returned to school Tuesday wearing a different pair of jean shorts. She was again informed they were too short, and, presumably, too distracting, and was slapped with a lunchtime detention for the alleged fashion crime. If she keeps wearing the shorts she will face in-school suspension, and then home suspension — and then, gulp, possible expulsion. All for some denim that, to this observer’s eyes, doesn’t offend any modern standards of decorum.

If all this seems a little bonkers, that is because it is. But the nuttiest bit of all is the position that it’s not really about the girls, anyway, but about the boys. Those poor pubescent lads, who will surely be too hormonally charged to study if the girl beside them in class happens to be wearing a pair of jean shorts.

For the male perspective allow me to say this, speaking as a former teenage boy: Boys, in general, hit an age, around 13, when girls are generally distracting. One day it is all about hockey and the guys and the next day it is all about hockey and, ‘Oh my god, I think she might have smiled at me and I am so nervous I think I might faint.’

Clothes could in theory amplify the day-to-day distraction girls can present to the adolescent male. But there are shorts, and then are shorts, and the shorts Julia Roberts-Davison’s daughter was wearing are not of the Miley-Cyrus-basically-naked-and-bending-over-and-twerking-variety.

We are talking about jean shorts here, without any rips, without a bare bottom hanging out of them — without any fleshy bits on display that could activate what are typically run-away 13-year-old male imaginations already. And what about the girls’ run-away imaginations? What about the hypothetical all-star-jock/beefcake strolling around campus in a tank top, all rippling muscles, and what not?

Does he need to cover up, too?

Why is the issue being viewed through a male lens? Think about it. Connect the dots and the place they eventually will lead to, when it is all about the boys, are the patriarchal backwaters where women are best seen by not being seen by any man at all, save for their husbands and family.

Standards and dress codes aren’t inherently bad. I am a Dad. I get it. I have a daughter who will be a teenager many years hence and I pray that, when that day comes, fashion trends will have reverted to a more retro-Victorian look where it is not all about what you see — but what you can’t see.

Even then, hormonal boys and their imaginations are not to be trusted.

And yet what we need to be most trusting of is common sense. By we, I mean parents. And schools. It is almost June. It has been a long winter. If the current trends call for jean shorts, let there be jean shorts. Julia Roberts-Davison did her bit. She made a choice mindful of her daughter’s wants that was mindful of the standards of modesty.

Now it is time for Truro Junior High’s administrators to make a choice, too.

Let’s hope it involves staying out Makayla KIng’s closet and leaving the double standards around boys and girls where they belong — in the past.